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Sometimes you just need to sit and wait and a story will come to you.
It’s been many years since I started suffering from something that I can only categorise as a disorder — a nagging and relentless need to keep moving, keep searching, keep finding, keep digging, keep learning, keep breathing in a different air every day. It probably started when I was a child — a happy, privileged, carefree kid whose only worry was not to spend her whole life as the same person. I couldn’t stop fretting that my life would be extremely boring if I stay me for dozens of years. Will I always be a girl from a big city who speaks Polish? Why can’t I turn into an Inuit boy from a village one day? And then into an American or Soviet astronaut? (Those were the times when American and Soviet astronauts were still a thing.) Why can’t I be German? My great-grandma was German so why can’t I?
Suffice to say no one really understood this conundrum.
It calmed down when I was a teenager. I busied myself with all the usual teenage stuff and seemed to accept the fact that I would remain a Polish girl turning one day into a Polish woman. And that was alright for a while.
Then I started suffering from wanderlust. I wanted to go everywhere — particularly to Australia and Africa. I read tons of travel memoirs. If it happened several years…
